Conor Burns, a fomer Tory minister who lost his seat at the election, has welcomed Mel Stride’s speech this morning (see 10.19am), but urged the party to go further – and rule out Liz Truss ever again being allowed to stand as a candidate for the Conservatives.In a post on social media, he said:It is long overdue for the Conservative Party to draw a line under the ClusterTruss.It was a period of shame in the Party’s noble history.With a lack of any self awareness, zero contrition and deranged conspiracy theories she has made it hard for the party to rebuild.

So depleted is the party that some of her most inept advocates now linger on the front bench.The Party should go one step further than today’s comments and make it clear that Truss will never again be an endorsed Conservative candidate for elected office.In that act the country may see, at last, that we get it.Burns is hardly neutral about Truss.While she was PM, he was sacked as a minister over a misconduct allegation which he strongly denied and for which he was subsequently cleared.

He claimed that he had been stitched up because he had spoken favourably about one of Truss’s rivals,A former Tory minister, Conor Burns, has said the Conservative party should ban Liz Truss from ever being a candidate again to show it understands the damage done by her mini-budget,(See 3,23pm,) Burns was speaking after Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, gave a speech disowning the mini-budget.

Stride told journalists that Kemi Badenoch will get better through time” at the media and at PMQs.(See 12.05pm.)Jeremy Hunt, the former Tory chancellor, has said that he thinks Truss is deluded about the reasons for her downfall.In an interview with the News Agents podcast, he said:There is this weird thing in politics where sometimes you persuade yourself to believe something that’s patently rubbish, because you just have to, because the psychological consequences of accepting.

Liz, as a free marketeer, can never accept that it was actually the markets that brought her down.And for her it has to be some fictitious plot by the establishment, the Bank of England.And the reality was the markets were not going to stomach those unfunded tax cuts and spending commitments.I think it’s often characterised as an issue of tax cuts, but it was actually the energy price guarantee that probably spooked the markets more than the tax cuts, because we were saying your energy bills will never be more than two grand.That’s a hell of a commitment in an environment where you think that energy prices are going to stay high for a long time …And I think she finds that very, very difficult.

So, she’s persuaded herself of all sorts of things that are just not true.Asked if he thought the Conservative party should throw Truss out, Hunt said he was conflicted.He explained:That is a decision for Kemi Badenoch.I feel slightly conflicted when asked that question, because she appointed me chancellor, and as I explain in the book, in the few days when she was prime minister, she had to do something quite courageous, which was to sit next to me in the House of Commons as I ripped up almost everything that she’d done as prime minister and everything she campaigned for, and she did so with significant courage.I know it’s not fashionable to stick up for Liz Truss, but that cannot have been easy for her, so I am nervous about publicly criticising her, but it’s absolutely not helpful what she’s doing, and I don’t agree with it, and I think we do have to draw a line under the mistakes of that period, because they are being thrown at us week in, week out in parliament.

A row has broken out in Reform UK after its newest MP called on the prime minister to ban the burqa, with the party’s chair, Zia Yusuf, saying it was a “dumb” question given that was not party policy,The expansion of free school meals will initially benefit far fewer children in England than claimed, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, as data shows more than one in four at state schools already receive free lunches,The government has named Mary-Ann Stephenson as its preferred candidate to be the next chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission,Stephenson, who runs the Women’s Budget Group, a feminist economics thinktank, and who has a PhD in equality law, would replace Kishwer Falkner, who is due to leave in November,Falkner, who was appointed by the Conservatives, has angered some Labour MPs by her stance on trans issues.

In particular, she has been blamed the nature of the EHRC’s interim, non-binding guidance on how to implement the supreme court ruling saying references to “women” in the Equality Act just mean biological women.The guidance has been criticised as simplistic, and unnecessarily unhelpful to trans people.For a full list of all the stories covered here today, scroll through the key events timeline at the top of the blog.The Unite union has urged the government to reinstate the winter fuel payment immediately.In a statement Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, said:Most people now recognise that the winter fuel cut was a massive mistake.

Unite has been calling on the government to scrap the cut from day one and I was pleased when the PM finally acknowledged this,This government needs to learn that when you are in a hole, you should stop digging,You can’t leave pensioners in limbo while you work out plans for taxing the families of the deceased - just reverse it now,We are the sixth richest economy in the world, and we need to stop picking the pockets of pensioners and bring in a wealth tax,Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, is on the rise again.

At the weekend he gave a speech to a Compass conference that George Eaton from the New Statesman described as “the most wide-ranging critique of the government from any senior Labour figure since the general election” and as ultimately resembling “a leadership manifesto”,In his report Eaton said:Though [Burnham] praised “good policies” such as the renationalisation of the railways, he repeatedly outflanked the government from the left, criticising “too much timidity in our offer, too much reluctance to show the courage of our convictions”,He called for Labour to abandon cuts to health and disability benefits, to impose higher taxes on wealth (Reeves’ aides repeatedly point out that she has already done so), to announce “the biggest and quickest council and social housing building programme the country has ever seen”, to reverse spending cuts to local authorities, to introduce free transport for teenagers in England, to replace first-past-the-post with proportional representation and to abolish the party whipping system (“which makes you vote for things you don’t fully agree with”),We covered the Burnham speech here,Burnham has elaborated on this in an interview with Beth Rigby from Sky News for her Electoral Dysfunction podcast.

He told her that it was possible Nigel Farage could become the next prime minister and he said Farage had “connected with people”.Rather than disparage Farage, it was more important to understand why he was connecting with people, Burnham said.Asked if he thought Labour were not connecting, he replied:I don’t think we’ve spoken enough to what I called working class ambition.So I’m thinking of the hundreds of thousands of people in this city, region that we’re in now who are held back by their housing situation.Families who perhaps generations before would have had the amazing benefit of a council house, that was that platform for working class people to have ambition in their lives, and propelled them to do amazing things.

I think we’re in a situation in this city at the moment where the kids can see the skyscrapers from their bedroom window, but they don’t necessarily feel they have a path to those places, or they can’t see themselves working there.So imagine where this place goes if we give them that give them that path.And this is all, what we’re doing with what’s called the Greater Manchester baccalaureate, the MBacc an equal alternative to the university route.There is a clip from the interview here, and the full version here.The full text of Mel Stride’s speech this morning is now on the Conservative party’s website.

Conor Burns, a fomer Tory minister who lost his seat at the election, has welcomed Mel Stride’s speech this morning (see 10.19am), but urged the party to go further – and rule out Liz Truss ever again being allowed to stand as a candidate for the Conservatives.In a post on social media, he said:It is long overdue for the Conservative Party to draw a line under the ClusterTruss.It was a period of shame in the Party’s noble history.With a lack of any self awareness, zero contrition and deranged conspiracy theories she has made it hard for the party to rebuild.

So depleted is the party that some of her most inept advocates now linger on the front bench,The Party should go one step further than today’s comments and make it clear that Truss will never again be an endorsed Conservative candidate for elected office,In that act the country may see, at last, that we get it,Burns is hardly neutral about Truss,While she was PM, he was sacked as a minister over a misconduct allegation which he strongly denied and for which he was subsequently cleared.

He claimed that he had been stitched up because he had spoken favourably about one of Truss’s rivals.A row has broken out in Reform UK after its newest MP called on the prime minister to ban the burqa, with the party’s chair, Zia Yusuf, saying it was a “dumb” question given that was not party policy, Rowena Mason reports.Remainers would argue that nothing good has come from Brexit, but they might agree that there is at least one exception: the New European, a weekly paper launched soon after the 2016 referendum to speak up for pro-Europeans, which has since won awards and thrived (no easy feat for a news publication these days).It says it is the fastest-growing politics and culture title in Britain.And today it has announced that it is relaunching with a new title, the New World.

In an article explaining why, Matt Kelly, its editor-in-chief, says this is not because the Brexit era is over; quite the opposite, he argues.The ideology that powered Brexit didn’t die on the bus – it spread.Trump, Covid, QAnon, the collapse of trust in institutions and authoritative sources, the rise of Milei, the mutation of Modi, the TikTok-ification of public life, and the creeping algorithmic authoritarianism of Big Tech.Brexit was the beginning: act one of a story that is now truly global – and grotesquely interconnected.From Washington to Budapest, New Delhi to Nairobi, Kyiv to El Salvador, what’s happening isn’t a fluke – it’s a pattern.

A dangerous one …We’re not rebranding because Brexit’s over – we’re rebranding because Brexit was just the beginning.The same toxic forces that drove it are now global: nationalism, disinformation, democratic backsliding.The New World reflects the bigger fight we’re in.We’re certainly not backing off the topic of Brexit – we’re going in harder.Rachel Keenan is a Guardian reporter.

Candidates in the Holyrood by-election contest for Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse byelection have cast their votes, after a brisk campaign following the death of the sitting MSP Christina McKelvie in March,The Scottish National party candidate, Katy Loudon, posted a video on Instagram outside a polling station where she says “the stakes couldn’t be higher” due to the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which is also contesting the seat,Davy Russell, the Scottish Labour candidate, posted a photograph of himself coming out of a polling station with the caption:It was an honour to vote in the village I grew up in this morning,Polls are open for the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election, so make your plan to vote and let’s put this community first!The full list of candidates is: Collette Bradley, Scottish Socialist party Andy Brady, Scottish Family party Ross Lambie, Reform UK Katy Loudon, SNPJanice MacKay, Ukip Ann McGuinness, Scottish Greens Aisha Mir, Scottish Liberal Democrats Richard Nelson, Scottish Conservatives Davy Russell, Scottish Labour Marc Wilkinson, independentRichard Adams is the Guardian’s education editor,The 2025 school census, published by the Department for Education this morning, has reignited claims and counter-claims about the effects of adding VAT to private school fees and whether children would be moved out by their parents to save money.

The statistics for England were collected by the DfE in January, when 20% VAT was first added to fees, and show that the number of pupils in private schools dropped by 1.9% or 11,000, compared with the same time last year.But it came as pupil numbers fell nationally by 60,000, because of a long-term fall in the birthrate.And the number of private schools operating in England went up by 35, according to the census.A government spokesperson was quick to claim that private school rolls hadn’t been greatly affected by the tax.

Today’s figures shatter the myth that charging VAT on private education would trigger an exodus,The data reveals pupil numbers remain firmly within historical patterns seen for over 20 years,The 1,9% decline in private school pupil numbers reflects the broader demographic trends and changes in the state sector, with almost no change in secondaries and a 1,3% reduction in state-funded primary school pupil numbers.

This manufactured crisis has failed to materialize,Ending tax breaks for private schools will raise £1,bn a year by 2029-30 to help fund public services, including supporting the 94% of children in state schools, to help ensure excellence everywhere for every child,The Independent Schools Council, which represents over half of the fee-paying schools in England, responded, with Julie Robinson, the council’s chief executive, saying:These new Department for Education statistics show that the drop in independent school numbers cannot be explained by the fall in overall pupil numbers,The government’s own figures now show that, in England alone, 8,000 more students have left independent education than politicians had estimated.

This outsized exodus should concern anyone who is interested in this tax on education as a revenue raiser.There are some nice pictures from Keir Starmer’s visit to a school in Essex this morning.The captions don’t fully explain what was going on, but at one point he seems to have engaged in a particularly lively conversation with the young girl sitting next to him, including on the topic of teeth.Keir Starmer has described the govenment’s decision to extend free school meals for pupils in England as a “statement of intent”, implying it will be followed by changes to the two-child benefit cap.Speaking to broadcasters on a visit to a school in Essex where he was promoting the free school meals policy, he said:This is a statement of intent.

It’s something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time.It’s the first time it’s ever been done …I would see it as part of a wider package, because we’ve already done work on child care, on breakfast clubs, on school uniforms.So it’s about [giving children] the best possible start, but it’s also essentially a cost of living issue for their parents.In a further answer, he described the policy three times as a “downpayment”.Asked if his use of the word “intent” meant he intended to life the two-child benefit cap, he replied:I would say this is a downpayment on child poverty.

We’ve got a taskforce that will come out with a strategy.I want to get to the root causes of child poverty.One of the greatest things the last Labour government did was to drive down child poverty.I’m determined we will do that.Today is a downpayment on that, but it goes with breakfast clubs already being rolled out … But yes, it’s a downpayment on what I want to do in relation to child poverty